Macleans.ca » Antarcticahttp://www.macleans.ca
Canada's national weekly current affairs magazineTue, 03 Mar 2015 21:58:13 +0000en-CAhourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2Cause of Antarctic plane crash that killed 3 Canadians a mysteryhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/investigators-cant-find-cause-of-antarctic-plane-crash-that-killed-3-canadians/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/investigators-cant-find-cause-of-antarctic-plane-crash-that-killed-3-canadians/#commentsFri, 20 Jun 2014 17:30:00 +0000The Canadian Presshttp://www.macleans.ca/?p=572109The men died in January 2013 when their Twin Otter crashed into the side of a mountain

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/investigators-cant-find-cause-of-antarctic-plane-crash-that-killed-3-canadians/feed/0Afghanistan vet Chris Downey on trekking to the Pole with Prince Harryhttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/the-interview/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/the-interview/#commentsMon, 06 Jan 2014 02:00:00 +0000Aaron Hutchinshttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=451734'Why wouldn’t I want to walk 300 km at minus 50 pulling my own sled? That sounds like a good time to me'

It was Chris Downey’s first tour of Afghanistan. He was one month in when, while on foot, the 28-year-old was blasted by an IED. His friend was killed, and he spent three months in hospital and more than two more years recovering. When the email came from Soldier On, a charity providing career counselling for wounded veterans, about a trek to the South Pole, he decided it would be a fitting tribute to his fallen comrade.

Q: Why did you join the Forces?

A:It’s what I’ve wanted to do since as far back as I can remember. There are pictures of me as a kid, three years old, dressed in my dad’s army stuff. My father was in the airborne regiment. At eight years old, I was in cadets. There was nothing else I wanted to do.

Q: Tell me what happened in Afghanistan.

A:It was May 3, 2010. I was part of an IED [improvised explosive device] team, which is basically responsible for getting rid of roadside bombs. On that day, we had to be on foot, because our vehicles couldn’t get there. Craig [Douglas Craig Blake], my teammate, successfully did his job and, when it was time to return to our vehicles—a two-kilometre hike—about halfway back, we were hit by an IED. It instantly killed Craig. I was about seven feet behind him, so I took a good chunk of it. I never lost consciousness. I couldn’t see. I could just hear and smell everything. I could feel my legs burning from the shrapnel. I couldn’t recognize any voices and started yelling out. That’s when my team leader started talking to me to keep me calm. It took about an hour to get me into surgery, and that’s where I went into 12 to 14 hours of surgery right away and woke up in Germany three days later. As for my injuries, I essentially lost my right eye. My jaw shattered. I lost parts of my gum and all my front teeth. I had hundreds of lacerations and burns. My right arm and right hand were completely mangled. And also, I had a collapsed lung.

Q: How has life been since that day?

A:The initial few weeks after were pretty brutal, working so hard just to survive and breathe, but I got really lucky. I had the right five people in Germany: five Canadian medics. They knew I loved challenges and wasn’t going to sit around. Even though I couldn’t move my right arm much, or see or talk, they started making me do things for myself, like clearing my throat through the [tracheotomy tube]. My life really started after that day—the things I’ve done, the places I’ve been. The pure joy I have for life now is irreplaceable.

A: Walking With the Wounded reached out to several charities, one being Soldier On in Canada. Soldier On sent an email asking if anybody was interested. I wrote back: “Sure, why not?” Why wouldn’t I want to walk 300 km at -50° pulling my own sled? That sounds like a good time. They selected eight Canadians to do interviews. From there, they selected three. The three of us, along with other candidates from the U.S., Australia and the U.K., went to Iceland for 2½ weeks of training, mini-expeditions and a final selection. They had to bring the team down to four: two Canadians and two Australians. I was lucky enough to be one of those two.

Q: What kind of training did you do on your own to prepare?

A: The day after the interviews, when I flew back to Cold Lake [Alta.], I built my own pulk [a small toboggan]. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I was walking from the base to my home—13 km—pulling a sled with 150 lb. Once the warmer weather hit, I started doing long-distance pulling tires, including doing the Army Run half-marathon with a tire behind me. Every night, I was watching a movie or a couple of shows while on the elliptical for 2½ to three hours. Sometimes I would turn my treadmill toward the wall and just walk with nothing to look at, just trying to mentally prepare myself for the nothingness of Antarctica.

Q: What were the conditions like in Antarctica?

A: When you initially land in Novo [the Russian station on the coast], it’s only about -5°—nothing extreme for us Canadians. From there, they flew us up to the 87th parallel, which is where we started the race. I think the warmest there was -35 without the wind. For Alex [fellow Canadian Alexandre Beaudin-D’Anjou] and me, we had experienced those colds before, so it wasn’t a shock. Mentally, it was very challenging, in that the way to ski and the way to maintain your body temperature goes against everything we know. Here, we dress nice and warm, but there, because you’re physically moving all day, you didn’t want to get warm. Getting up in the morning, I would take off layers to the point where I was wearing a thin layer against my skin, and then just my shell, and that was it. The skiing and carrying your pulk created so much heat that you had no choice, or you’d sweat and start to freeze.

Q: What was the hardest day for you?

A: On the second day, I had so many problems breathing, the doctor pulled me out to get oxygen and some rest. Luckily, I got to go back the very next day. It only lasted for about 27 hours.

Q: What happened?

A: The altitude got to me. I was skiing perfectly fine, listening to music and having a great day. Next thing I knew, I was on the ground and [my teammates were] pulling my head up and taking my skis off. I passed out—first time in my life. The doctor took about an hour and a half to get there, but once he did, they got oxygen on me and I started feeling better right away. Just to make sure, they pulled me back to the main camp and let me rest overnight.

Q: What was it like to walk for hours a day in such a harsh environment?

A: When we were there, you really just got lost in your head. I had an iPod playing the whole time, so I had music and audiobooks. I actually had a book called Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration, one of the most brutal survival stories ever, and I played that for two days. It was a good way for me to completely lose myself in the environment. My body was just doing the mechanics, but my mind was completely outside of that environment, so the skiing days went by really fast. The struggles were still there. I had a lot of chest and breathing issues with the altitude.

Q: How many hours would you walk each day?

A: It was eight hours a day and our team was covering about 24 km a day. Of course, that was until we decided the race was no longer going to be part of it and then, after that, we all skied together and that mileage changed.

Q: How many days into the trip was the race aspect called off?

A: We had already covered 130 km [of 335 km]. It was five days or so. Just the number of injuries, it was taking away from enjoying the moment. And really, the goal was for all 12 wounded to stand at the South Pole together and to spread the message that, if you work hard enough, have the right support and the right opportunities, then there’s nothing that you can’t do.

Q: What was camp like? What did you eat?

A: Every night, we’d set up our tent, break up some blocks of ice or hard snow, and get in. We had a small stove that we would turn on and start melting snow. It’s the only way you get water. It’s also the only way to eat. We had freeze-dried food, the kind you add water to and let cook for a bit. That was basically it. You spent your night preparing for the next day. You boil water to fill your thermoses—we carried about 2½ litres of water a day to drink—ate your meal and dried off your gear. We listened to music, played cards and talked a lot. The tent is quite amazing. It could be -50 outside and, just because of the continuous sun, it warmed up the tent enough that we could sit in there comfortably. Every night, I wore a pair of fleece pants and a fleece shirt. That was it, sometimes with no socks on—never a toque, no gloves, sitting on top of my sleeping bag. That’s how much the sun heated up these tents. It was a little paradise. It actually got to the point where, while you were skiing, all you could think of was to get in that tent.

Q: One person who got a lot of attention for this trip was Prince Harry. What was it like skiing next to him?

A: It was great. Once we were there and all together, he was just another soldier. It was like hanging out with one of the guys. We didn’t feel his status from the outside world. He’s pulling his own stuff. He was treading through every inch like we were, struggling like we were, telling jokes, laughing. We talked about Afghanistan, sports. He’s just a regular guy.

Q: Describe what it was like to reach the South Pole.

A: It was extremely emotional. From the day I started this, I said I would reserve the last kilometre for [Craig] and me. That was something for me, to finally say my goodbye, something I never had the chance to do because of all the time I spent in the hospital. I never made the funeral. At about 1.5 km to go, I stopped, pulled out a Canadian flag and laid it over the pulk, just like we do for the coffins when we lose somebody overseas or in combat. On top of that, I put a picture of Craig, a diver’s coin, and a bracelet he had made—one that I was wearing the day I got hit. I skied next to everybody, making sure that the footsteps I was taking were just for him and me. I spent the last kilometre talking to him and thanking him. By the time I reached the Pole, I was in tears. It just came rushing through. I had this amazing goodbye to my friend, which was exactly what I needed in the perfect place to do it. And then I started thinking of my brother, my mom, my dad, every single person who had gotten me there. Once I got ahold of my emotions, Alex and I started having fun. I did the traditional handstand, so I could say I was holding the world. I ran around the Pole, so I could say I ran around the world. It was a celebration.

Q: What will be your next adventure?

A: I’ll be running in the London Marathon as part of the Walking With the Wounded. That will be my first marathon. I’m also hoping to take two wounded soldiers and two abled soldiers to the North Pole in April 2015. I want to do this because we fight together; some of us get hurt, but then we recover together.

Antarctica belongs to nobody and everybody; it’s a continent dedicated to “peace and science,” a utopian prospect helped by the fact it has no founding race, barely a century of human history and no permanent human inhabitants to muck things up. Oh, it has visitors: some 30,000 tourists annually, 3,000 transient scientists and quite frequently English science writer Gabrielle Walker. Her book is a multi-dimensional examination of the closest thing we have to Mars. One is tempted to call it a warm look at a cold place, but it is more accurately a respectful exploration of all that makes it tick: its history, geography, the characters both human and animal that cling to this vast, indifferent, all-powerful ice sheet. Barely a page goes by without Walker holding up a shiny new fact, much like the stones gathered as symbols of wealth and utility by the penguins—those inevitable “annoyingly cute icons” she tries—and fails—to despise. Did you know, for instance, dinosaurs roamed through the ferns and forests there less than 100 million years ago? Or that today’s more modest warming trend is disintegrating ice sheets at an alarming rate on a continent with “enough ice to swamp our puny, shore-hugging civilizations.”?

We know this because scientists are crazy enough to live there. Crazy’s formal name is “winter-over syndrome,” when light, logic and inhibition vanish for months. She writes of a scientist who set out to ski 1,300 km in the dark to the relative comfort of McMurdo Station with just a few chocolate bars in his pocket, and another who packed his bags, bade farewell, and deludedly tried to walk there on a treadmill.

Then there are those who pay with their lives. This January a Twin Otter crashed into a remote mountain slope. The bodies of its three Canadian crew remain entombed in the wreckage; the prospect of recovering them is uncertain. “The truth is,” writes Walker, “Antarctica has little time for humans.”

Visit the Maclean’sBookmarked blog for news and reviews on all things literary

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/antarctica-an-intimate-portrait-of-a-mysterious-continent-2/feed/0Robert Murray Heathhttp://www.macleans.ca/society/robert-murray-heath/
http://www.macleans.ca/society/robert-murray-heath/#commentsWed, 13 Feb 2013 12:00:00 +0000Rosemary Westwoodhttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=347430He'd spent his life flying around the world—he even married his wife on a flight

Robert Murray Heath was born Nov. 7, 1957, in Mississauga, Ont. His father, Robert, was an engineer and his mother, Betty, was a telephone sales operator. Robert Sr. owned a hobby plane and Robert spent as much time as he could beside his dad in the cockpit, falling in love with planes.

Robbie to his parents and one older sister, Gail, “Bob” to most everyone else, he attended Mississauga’s Allan A. Martin Public School. When he was 12, he joined the Air Cadets, where he learned to fly gliders, then small planes, and earned his pilot’s licence. After graduating from Gordon Graydon Memorial Secondary School, he moved to Moncton, N.B., to do commercial and instructor flight training.

In 1985, Bob took a job with Sabourin Airways in the small community of Red Lake, in northwestern Ontario. He flew small planes—the Beechcraft 99 and Piper Navajo Chieftain—mostly to remote reservations and on hunting and fishing trips. On a medevac flight, he met Lucy Geno, a dark-haired nurse who worked at the Red Lake hospital. She was 10 years his elder, and he courted her with gifts of doughnuts and rabbit-trimmed hats. Lucy was the mother of three grown children when the couple met, and Bob soon became Papa to them all. The couple married on Nov. 17, 1990, in a Twin Otter flying at 5,280 feet—exactly one mile—above Red Lake. Lucy wore an embroidered red parka; Bob wore his flight suit.

Bob, who had a beard, sparkly eyes and a full belly laugh, was “mum’s soulmate,” says Helen Prest, Lucy’s daughter. With his quirky sense of humour, he was “always up to some sort of shenanigan,” says pilot Norm Wright.

In 1991, Bob found work in Inuvik, N.W.T., just north of the Arctic Circle. He piloted Twin Otter planes for Kenn Borek Air Ltd., serving remote Inuit communities and delivering what he called “mad scientists” to ice floes on polar-bear research expeditions. Lucy followed two years later. They settled into a burgundy townhouse, which quickly filled up with Bob’s books and collections of Aboriginal paintings and Inuit carvings. Bob soon became a legend in the Arctic flying community.

For the past 15 years, he’d leave the Arctic in the fall and fly a Twin Otter all the way to Antarctica, the bottom of the Earth, a four-day trip; he spent the Canadian winters there, delivering scientists to research stations and snapping photographs of the striking, barren landscape in his spare time. A man of insatiable curiosity, he never failed to ask what they were doing, why and how he could help, and collected patches from various countries’ research outposts to stitch to his leather aviator jacket. In the spring, he’d fly back to the Arctic, stopping off to see family in Winnipeg or Toronto, regaling them with tales of his latest exploits at the frozen ends of the Earth. (He was a talented, if long-winded, storyteller). When he wasn’t at either pole, Bob zig-zagged over the globe, ferrying planes to Asia or South America for Kenn Borek.

To Bob, “flying was an adventure,” says his son-in-law Joe Prest. “Flying in the Arctic on Monday,” Bob once wrote on a pilot message board. “Golfing in Scotland on Wednesday, and seeing the Pyramids two days later.” It was quite the life. Once, a woman gave birth in the back of a Navajo plane he was piloting. Bob loved teaching younger pilots and had a talent for foreign tongues. Fluent in Spanish and Italian, he spoke passable Ojibwa and Tagalog, a language spoken in the Philippines.

Still, every adventure took him home to Inuvik to Lucy, and Bob’s little bichon frisé, Sebastian, who waited atop his big leather chair. On the ground, Bob spent his days with his nose deep in a book or whipping up elaborate meals for his large family, which included six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. He loved to eat and cook, especially shrimp, but Helen says he’d leave the kitchen “a right wreck.”

Last October, Bob took off for another season in Antarctica. On Jan. 23, he was flying a Twin Otter with two other crew members over the remote, jagged Queen Alexandra mountain range, en route to an Italian research station at Terra Nova Bay. They never made it. Two days later, rescue crews spotted the plane’s tail jutting from a steep, 3,900-m slope, embedded in snow and ice. They deemed the crash “not survivable.” Bob was 55.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/robert-murray-heath/feed/11Transportation Safety Board looking for cause of plane crash in Antarcticahttp://www.macleans.ca/general/transportation-safety-board-looking-for-cause-of-plane-crash-in-antarctica/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/transportation-safety-board-looking-for-cause-of-plane-crash-in-antarctica/#commentsSat, 26 Jan 2013 20:42:38 +0000The Canadian Presshttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=342801Officials from Canada are investigating a plane crash in Antarctica that appears to have killed all three crew members on board.
Julie Leroux of the Transportation Safety Board says that…

Officials from Canada are investigating a plane crash in Antarctica that appears to have killed all three crew members on board.

Julie Leroux of the Transportation Safety Board says that since the Twin Otter was operated by a Canadian company, Kenn Borek Air of Calgary, Canadian officials have already started working on the investigation.

Two helicopters dispatched by the Rescue Coordination Centre in New Zealand have confirmed earlier sightings of the wreckage of the missing craft on a steep slope near the summit of Mount Elizabeth.

Officials with the centre said the impact appears to have been direct and would not have been survivable.

Leroux says Canadian investigators have already collected data and conducted interviews, but she says they don’t know yet whether it will be possible to reach the remote crash site.

The plane took off last Wednesday from the South Pole, headed to an Italian base in Antarctica’s Terra Nova Bay, but it never arrived.

According to a statement released Friday by Kenn Borek Air, helicopter crews and mountain rescue personnel will attempt to access the crash site on Saturday if weather conditions are favourable.

The pilot has been identified by friends as Bob Heath of Inuvik while media reports have identified a second crew member as Mike Denton, a newlywed from Calgary whose photographs of planes appear on the Kenn Borek website.

The third crew member had not yet been identified.

New Zealand officials say the next of kin of the three men have been informed.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/transportation-safety-board-looking-for-cause-of-plane-crash-in-antarctica/feed/0Plane wreckage spotted in Antarctic, Canadian crew believed to be deadhttp://www.macleans.ca/general/plane-wreckage-spotted-in-antarctic-canadian-crew-believed-to-be-dead/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/plane-wreckage-spotted-in-antarctic-canadian-crew-believed-to-be-dead/#commentsSat, 26 Jan 2013 10:30:04 +0000The Canadian Presshttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=342647The wreckage of a Twin Otter aircraft missing for several days in Antarctica was found late Friday night and the three-member Canadian crew is believed to be dead.
Two helicopters…

The wreckage of a Twin Otter aircraft missing for several days in Antarctica was found late Friday night and the three-member Canadian crew is believed to be dead.

Two helicopters dispatched by the Rescue Coordination Centre in New Zealand — it was early Saturday evening local time — confirmed earlier sightings of the wreckage of the craft operated by Kenn Borek Air of Calgary on a steep slope near the summit of Mount Elizabeth.

Officials with the centre said the impact appears to have been direct and would not have been survivable.

The next of kin of the three men have been informed.

The pilot has been identified by friends as Bob Heath of Inuvik while media reports have identified a second crew member as Mike Denton, a newlywed from Calgary whose photographs of planes appear on the Kenn Borek website.

The third crew member had not yet been identified.

Rescue mission coordinator Tracy Brickles said it was very sad end to the operation.

“It has been difficult operation in challenging conditions but we remained hopeful of a positive result,” she said. “Our thoughts are now with the families of the crewmen.”

The plane took off last Wednesday from the South Pole, headed to an Italian base in Antarctica’s Terra Nova Bay, but it never arrived.

An emergency locator beacon was detected coming from the north end of Antarctica’s Queen Alexandra range — about halfway between the South Pole and McMurdo Station, a U.S. research centre.

New Zealand search and rescue teams were hampered by bad weather over the next couple of days — snow, bitter cold, high winds and low cloud cover made it impossible for planes passing over the site to see anything.

Then, the locator signal stopped. Officials said that wasn’t unusual, as the battery life of the device is not long, but the information they had gleaned allowed them to pinpoint the plane’s coordinates.

On Friday, a break in the weather allowed rescuers to set up a forward base at Beardmore Glacier, about 50 kilometres from the crash site, where there is a landing strip and a fuel depot.

Working in their favour was the fact that at this time of year, nearly 24-hour daylight allowed for longer search hours.

Helicopters and other planes were called in to bring supplies and aid in the search.

A statement on the Kenn Borek Air website said visual contact with the wreckage was first made by a C-130 Hercules aircraft of the New York Air National Guard, and the sighting was later confirmed by another Twin Otter deployed by the airline.

“Every rescue mission, you hope for the best,” said Pania Shingleton, a spokeswoman for the rescue centre.

“Even yesterday we were hopeful because they were pretty well equipped and they knew what to do in a tough environment.”

Indeed, those who knew Heath said if anyone would know how to survive such a crash, it would be the highly experienced pilot.

“He’s a bit of a living legend up (North),” friend and fellow pilot Sebastien Seykora said earlier this week.

“He’s been flying down there for at least a decade. If somebody had a question about how to do things, especially about going down there, he would be the guy they would ask.”

Heath had logged thousands of hours teaching young flyers in regions from the Maritimes to northern Ontario, said Roger Townsend, who was a co-pilot with Heath out of Red Lake, Ont.

His Twin Otter was well-equipped with survival equipment, including mountain tents and supplies which could have lasted five days.

What will happen next was not immediately clear.

According to the Kenn Borek statement, if weather conditions are favourable, helicopter crews and mountain rescue personnel will attempt to access the crash site on Saturday morning.

Shingleton said no decisions had yet been made on any recovery mission.

“There are obviously things that still need to be decided. We’re just determining those between New Zealand and the U.S. McMurdo base and others,” she said.

Kenn Borek Air has been in operation since 1970. According to the company’s website, 14 aircraft participated in its 2012 Antarctic season.

The company, which is also a fixture in Canada’s North, has been sending planes to Antarctica for the past 28 years.

In 2001, its pilots and planes were involved in the daring rescue of an ailing American doctor from the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

In 2009, the company was commissioned to recover an aircraft that had been involved in an accident nearly a year earlier. A 12-person Kenn Borek recovery crew spent 25 days at a remote field camp on the eastern side of the Antarctic Plateau to carry out the operation.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/plane-wreckage-spotted-in-antarctic-canadian-crew-believed-to-be-dead/feed/0Antarctic rescue mission for 3 Canadians resumes as weather improveshttp://www.macleans.ca/general/antarctic-rescue-mission-for-3-canadians-resumes-as-weather-improves/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/antarctic-rescue-mission-for-3-canadians-resumes-as-weather-improves/#commentsSat, 26 Jan 2013 02:36:10 +0000The Canadian Presshttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=342594Rescue officials have been able to land a Twin Otter aircraft about 50 kilometres away from where another Twin Otter carrying three Canadians is believed to have gone down in…

Rescue officials have been able to land a Twin Otter aircraft about 50 kilometres away from where another Twin Otter carrying three Canadians is believed to have gone down in Antarctica earlier this week.

In a news release issued Saturday afternoon local time — early Friday evening in western Canada — the Rescue Coordination Centre New Zealand says the plan is to set up a forward base at the Beardmore Glacier.

The site has a small landing strip and a fuel depot.

Mission coordinator Tracy Brickles says two helicopters are en route and a C-130 Hercules aircraft is circling the area trying to make visual contact before landing at the forward base to deliver supplies.

A DC-3 aircraft carrying further supplies is also en route.

The plane operated by Kenn Borek Air in Calgary is believed to have gone down in mountainous terrain on Wednesday.

The pilot has been identified by friends as Bob Heath of Inuvik while media reports have identified a second crew member as Mike Denton, a newlywed from Calgary whose photographs of planes appear on the Kenn Borek website.

The third crew member has not yet been identified.

High winds, bitter cold, blowing snow and low cloud cover have hampered attempts to locate the downed plane, but a break in the weather is now providing a good chance to launch the search.

The plane’s emergency broadcast beacon has stopped transmitting, but officials say that’s not unusual since the battery life of the device is limited. They say the information they got from the beacon has allowed them to get a fix on the plane’s location.

“When the weather allows, we can use (the forward base) as a launch pad to get into the area of the last known position,” said search and rescue officer John Dickson.

The plane took off from the South Pole and headed to an Italian base in Antarctica’s Terra Nova Bay, but never made it.

The plane’s signal came from the north end of Antarctica’s Queen Alexandra range — about halfway between the South Pole and McMurdo Station.

The status of the three Canadians is not known and there has been no communication received from them, but officials said the plane was well-equipped with survival equipment, including mountain tents and supplies designed to last five days.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/antarctic-rescue-mission-for-3-canadians-resumes-as-weather-improves/feed/1Rescuers in Antarctica wait for break in weatherhttp://www.macleans.ca/general/rescuers-in-antarctica-wait-for-break-in-weather/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/rescuers-in-antarctica-wait-for-break-in-weather/#commentsFri, 25 Jan 2013 10:28:31 +0000The Canadian Presshttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=341906A forecasted break in the weather could be the best opportunity for searchers to find a group of Canadians missing in Antarctica.
Steve Rendle of New Zealand’s Rescue Coordination Centre…

A forecasted break in the weather could be the best opportunity for searchers to find a group of Canadians missing in Antarctica.

Steve Rendle of New Zealand’s Rescue Coordination Centre said skies were expected to clear in the area Saturday morning local time — Friday afternoon in Alberta — which could allow rescue teams to fly over where the plane owned by Calgary-based Kenn Borek Air is believed to have gone down.

The Twin Otter began transmitting signals from its emergency locator beacon early Wednesday. Aircraft tried twice to spot it in the mountainous area where it went down but failed due to heavy, low cloud.

If the weather clears, Rendle said they hope to establish a base of operations at a runway and fuel depot located at the Beardmore Glacier, about 50 kilometres from the presumed crash site.

From there, helicopters would be dispatched to search for the craft.

Rendle said the signal from the locator beacon is no longer being received.

“But that’s to be expected as the battery life is limited,” he explained, adding it’s not a problem, as rescue teams have a fix on the beacon’s coordinates.

Rendle wouldn’t say if it’s a concern that there have been no communications with the plane’s crew, saying there are a number of scenarios that could explain the silence.

“But we don’t speculate on what we haven’t been able to see,” he said. “There’s no point in it.”

Those who know the pilot of the downed craft say that if anyone would know how to get through, it would be Bob Heath.

“He’s a bit of a living legend up (North),” said friend and fellow pilot Sebastien Seykora. “He’s been flying down there for at least a decade. If somebody had a question about how to do things, especially about going down there, he would be the guy they would ask.”

Heath, who lives in Inuvik, N.W.T., has logged thousands of hours teaching young flyers in regions from the Maritimes to northern Ontario and administers tests to other pilots, said Roger Townsend, who was a co-pilot with Heath out of Red Lake, Ont. Flying with Heath was always a learning experience, Townsend said.

“He used it as an opportunity to impart knowledge. He’s a true instructor with an extraordinary passion for teaching and training.”

The Twin Otter was well-equipped with survival equipment, including mountain tents and supplies which could last five days.

The missing plane’s signal came from the north end of Antarctica’s Queen Alexandra range — about halfway between the South Pole and McMurdo Station. The site is roughly four hours by helicopter from an American base at McMurdo Station. It’s a two-hour flight with a DC-3.

Authorities in Canada have been in contact with officials organizing the search in New Zealand. Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs said officials from the Canadian High Commission in Wellington are working closely with local authorities.

Kenn Borek Air, which is experienced in Antarctic aviation, did not provide any details on the three crew members on board the missing twin-engine propeller aircraft.

A spokesman for the U.S. National Science Foundation — which operates an Antarctic research station helping in the search — said they were thought to be a pilot, a co-pilot and a flight engineer.

The plane was flying from the South Pole to an Italian base in Antarctica’s Terra Nova Bay. The region is in New Zealand’s area of responsibility and that country’s rescue crews have been working with U.S., Canadian and Italian authorities.

Kenn Borek Air has been in operation since 1970. According to the company’s website, 14 aircraft participated in its 2012 Antarctic season.

The company, which is also a fixture in Canada’s North, has been sending planes to Antarctica for the past 28 years.

In 2001, its pilots and planes were involved in the daring rescue of an ailing American doctor from the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

In 2009, the company was commissioned to recover an aircraft that had been involved in an accident nearly a year earlier. A 12-person Kenn Borek recovery crew spent 25 days at a remote field camp on the eastern side of the Antarctic Plateau to carry out the operation.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/rescuers-in-antarctica-wait-for-break-in-weather/feed/0Southern food is so hot right now. What’s next? Antarctica?http://www.macleans.ca/general/southern-food-is-so-hot-right-now-whats-next-antarctica/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/southern-food-is-so-hot-right-now-whats-next-antarctica/#commentsThu, 15 Mar 2012 16:29:51 +0000Jessica Allenhttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=245673Isn't it time for local cuisine to emerge from the south polar region?

You don’t need me to tell you that southern cooking is dominating the minds and filling the stomachs of serious gastronomes everywhere; the variations of grits and fried chicken populating trendy restaurant menus alone could have tipped you off. But there have been plenty of other harbingers, literary in nature, including an October 2011 New Yorker profile of Sean Brock, the Charleston chef extraordinaire who goes to great lengths to preserve the south’s indigenous produce and livestock; the February issue of Bon Appetit, which featured 41 “soulful recipes from American’s new food capital,” plus a fried chicken leg in all it’s battered glory on the cover; and a great piece in the Globe and Mail that focuses on another star chef of the southern cooking movement, Ottawa-raised Hugh Acheson. It’s actually pretty exciting that a North American regional cuisine is front and centre, stealing some thunder from the Italians. (Personally, I hope that Maritime cooking, from both Canada and the U.S., is next!)

But I’ve also noticed another contender for southern food supremacy: Antarctica. In the third issue of Lucky Peach, the magazine launched by chef and restaurateur David Cheng in collaboration with McSweeney’s last year, there’s a charming interview with the dinner production line cook for the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. (In fact, the entire issue is a keeper.) And in the current issue of CityBitesmagazine, there’s mention of a limited edition book about to be published called, The Antarctic Book of Cooking and Cleaning. It’s the story of a Russian-Canadian clean up project told by the two women in charge of the well-being of the volunteers, who culled their journals, recipes, menu plans and photographs for the book.

Of course, the south needn’t actually worry about Antarctica stealing their status. The continent has a population of zero permanent residents; most food can’t actually grow there (although, according to the website Cool Antarctica, “some stations grow fresh vegetables on a hydroponic system where the plants grow in slowly circulating water with nutrients dissolved in it,”); ice makes it hard to harvest whales, seals, fish and birds for dinner, and The Antarctic Treaty forbids the import of soil because of the risk of introducing non-native insects, fungi or bacteria. So the chance of the South Pole coming up with a regional cuisine that could compete with southern cooking is, well, nil.

Still, because there are 4,000 plus people from 30 different nations who man the permanent stations and field camps, it’s safe to assume that there have been some fairly interesting dinner parties held on the continent. And perhaps one or two concluded with a siphoning of scotch—preferably from the century-old cases left behind in the Antarctic ice by Ernest Shackleton.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/southern-food-is-so-hot-right-now-whats-next-antarctica/feed/3The Falcon and the snowmanhttp://www.macleans.ca/authors/colby-cosh/the-falcon-and-the-snowman/
http://www.macleans.ca/authors/colby-cosh/the-falcon-and-the-snowman/#commentsFri, 08 Oct 2010 14:42:24 +0000Colby Coshhttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=151612It is exciting to see the octogenarian Roland Huntford fighting back against the three decades of revisionism and carping that followed upon the publication of his 1979 book Scott and …

It is exciting to see the octogenarian Roland Huntford fighting back against the three decades of revisionism and carping that followed upon the publication of his 1979 book Scott and Amundsen. The book may be more familiar as The Last Place on Earth, which is the title it was given after a mini-series by that name was produced from it. When Scott and Amundsen was published, in the face of threats from imperial nostalgiacs and family members of Robert Falcon Scott, it was seen as the final nail in the coffin of Scott’s reputation.

It had long been obvious to students of polar-expedition lore that Scott had been, as Huntford was to put it, a “heroic bungler”. The Worst Journey in the World, published in 1922 by Scott expedition officer Apsley Cherry-Garrard, scattered cautious hints about Scott’s quality as a commander—and more or less gave the game away with its title. (It is generally thought to be the best single account written by any member of the Shackleton-Scott-Amundsen South Pole race.) But when Huntford was finished with Scott, even the “heroic” part of his reputation was really no longer tenable.

Huntford’s book was followed by a concerted effort to pry loose that coffin nail he had hammered in so firmly. Scott supporters tried to revive the argument, made in Leonard Huxley’s coyly sanitized 1913 edition of Scott’s diaries, that Scott and his South Pole party had run into unforeseeably horrible weather conditions—conditions confined only to Scott’s route; conditions which, by some terrible magic, failed to impede the nearly contemporaneous, geographically parallel Amundsen journey. Huntford has sometimes been derided in Britain as a vaguely treasonable Norwegian partisan—he speaks and reads the language, which is the sort of intellectual attainment that tends to invite suspicion amongst superpatriots—but if Huntford is a psychic traitor, how fortunate for him that the case against Scott was so easy to make.

Scott made dozens of inexcusable, baffling errors and openly irrational judgments in expedition planning, and much of the time, energy, and expenditure involved was consumed with what can only be called screwing around. The commander messed about with motor sledges and ponies when he should have been seeing to the integrity of his fuel tins and the ski education of his men. Later, when both fared poorly on the trail, he blamed everyone but himself.

Weather may have pushed Scott further and further behind Amundsen, extending the Norwegian’s 11-day head start to 34 days by the time Scott reached the pole. But it can’t really explain why Amundsen’s team, with its efficient “eat the dog teams and dash to the Pole” approach, suffered no casualties while Scott’s sledge-hauling wretches suffered falls, snow blindness, scurvy, and delirium. Cherry-Garrard was aware in the ’20s that Scott’s energy budgeting had been Enron-esque, and came as close to success as it did only through inhuman prodigies of effort. In a time before the discovery of Vitamin C, Amundsen took the possibility of scurvy seriously and used knowledge of Inuit and Viking dietary practices to formulate a completely effective prevention plan. Scott, forced by his financial backers to bring a doctor with Arctic experience along on the expedition, stubbornly ignored evidence-based advice to hunt for and consume as much fresh meat as possible.

When the time came to choose a three-man party to accompany him on the run to the Pole, Scott improvised a new supply arrangement and took four instead. These included the jovial, enormous petty officer Edgar Evans, who felt the effects of poor nutrition most and died first, and the famous Captain Oates, whose Boer War wound left him especially vulnerable to scurvy and fatigue. Oates, as every good Anglo-Saxon child knows, had to commit suicide to give the last three survivors even a miserably slender chance at making it back to camp.

It is hard to see Scott as anything but criminally negligent unless one possesses some prior, arbitrary emotional commitment to his legend. He wrote the story of his own last days, and it is hard to find any reason to admire him that doesn’t depend on blind faith in that account, which was written with reputation foremost in mind. He was a great believer in morale and élan, an inexhaustible lugger of grudges, and a self-promoter unto the last strokes of his pen. It is difficult to imagine that he could have been of much comfort to his disillusioned charges in their final frigid days. Long may his self-appointed vindicators continue to feel Huntford’s coolly apportioned wrath.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/authors/colby-cosh/the-falcon-and-the-snowman/feed/7100-year-old scotch, on icehttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/100-year-old-scotch-on-ice/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/100-year-old-scotch-on-ice/#commentsThu, 26 Aug 2010 15:00:59 +0000macleans.cahttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=143550Five crates of Mackinlay’s and two cases of brandy were found in 2006, buried in the Antarctic

After a day of dodging icebergs, an Antarctic explorer could be excused for warming up with a glass of scotch (hold the rocks, please). Mackinlay’s was the drink of choice for Sir Ernest Shackleton during his famed expedition at the turn of the 20th century.

Five crates of Mackinlay’s and two cases of brandy were found in 2006, buried in the ice beneath the hut at McMurdo Sound where Shackleton and his crew wintered during the Nimrod expedition. After convincing the 12 Antarctic Treaty nations to allow researchers to drill through the ice, the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust extracted one case in May. It spent several weeks defrosting at the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch before it was cracked open last week to reveal 11 bottles wrapped in paper and cushioned by straw. (One bottle was missing, and another was half-full, suggesting one of the explorers helped himself.)

Richard Paterson, a master scotch maker at Whyte and Mackay of Glasgow (which owns the modern-day Charles Mackinlay & Co.) is impatiently awaiting his bottle. Paterson, who doesn’t know whether to expect a single or double malt, is assigned the task of recreating it to sell. But he can hardly wait to extract a few drops and bury his nose in the very well-aged whisky.